A terminal failure in qualifying cost Laura van den Hengel her home weekend
Zandvoort was supposed to be the weekend where Laura van den Hengel raced in front of her own crowd. Instead she spent most of it watching her Maserati being taken apart and put back together, and the part of the weekend she did get was over in fifteen laps.
The Dutch driver shares the #85 Maserati GT2 of Iron Dames by SP Racing with Belgian Sarah Bovy in the GT2 European Series, which supported the GT World Challenge Europe round at Zandvoort from 18 to 20 September. Sixteen cars were entered. The #85 was one of them on paper for both races. It made the start of only one.
The weekend ended in the second qualifying session
The damage was done on Saturday morning. The stewards recorded it plainly: the car suffered a terminal failure during Q2 and did not take part in Race 1. The official classification for that race lists fifteen starters and fifteen finishers. The #85 is not among them. It is marked did not start.
Race 1 went to the #3 of E. Gialdini and M. Njor, who covered the twenty-nine laps in 50:33.004. By then the Iron Dames crew had a car in pieces and an evening in front of them.
The stewards signed off a single lap to prove the repair
What happened next is unusual enough that it left a paper trail. Having worked on the car, the team asked the stewards for a hardship lap, a single run to satisfy themselves that the repair had held before committing to a race start. Under Article 30.8 of the GT2 European Series Sporting Regulations, that needs permission.
It was granted at 18:53 on Saturday evening. Stewards’ Decision 18 authorised one lap, to be run on Sunday morning at 08:50, with the car to be presented at Box 0 at 08:35. One lap, at a quarter to nine on a Sunday, to find out whether a weekend still existed.
Fifteen laps of a twenty-nine lap race
The lap was completed and the car took the start of Race 2. Sixteen cars went to the grid this time. Fifteen were classified. The one that was not is the #85, credited with fifteen laps, fourteen behind the winner. The #3 won again, this time in 50:54.369.
So the scoreboard for a home weekend reads: one race not started, one race not finished, and a little over half a race distance of actual running out of two.
Van den Hengel told RNT-Motorsports she was frustrated by how the weekend went, with Saturday lost entirely to the technical problem and Sunday amounting to a short run before it went wrong again. We will be speaking to her at greater length shortly.
The weekend was not completely free of paperwork before all this, either. Stewards’ Decision 02 records a pit lane speeding infringement by car 85 in the first free practice session, dealt with by a fine.
The detail we keep coming back to
The detail we keep coming back to is the hardship lap. A failure in qualifying is ordinary bad luck and every team gets a share of it. What is not ordinary is a crew rebuilding a GT2 car overnight and then having to formally ask permission to drive it once around the circuit to see whether the work had held, at 08:50 on a Sunday, in front of nobody. They did that, and then the car stopped again. Zandvoort is a home race that comes around once. Losing it this way stings more than losing it slowly.
